World Backup Day: Now’s the Time to Fortify Your Digital Existence

External hard drives are one place to back up your data. Photo Illustration: Simon Lutrin/Wired

If you haven’t backed up your digital data yet, you are a fool. No offense. Seriously, though, it is so, so, so easy to lose everything. And guess what: A lot of people who want you to buy stuff have made up a holiday around the concept. Think Valentine’s Day, only this time it’s a good idea. Happy World Backup Day, everyone! Marketing scam or no, we urge you to celebrate.

Backing up your data isn’t just practical — say, if you want to transfer everything from your current computer to a new one — it’s an incredibly important safeguard against total digital loss. Whether you get hacked, your hard drive crashes, or you accidentally spill a cup of coffee across your keyboard, you’ll want to make sure that a copy of your collection of Skrillex albums and selfies are safely stored elsewhere for retrieval.

Here are some ways to back up your computer and prevent digital loss. Of course, this isn’t a comprehensive list, so go ahead and hit us in the comments with your best techniques.

The Old Standby: The External Hard Drive

One of the simplest ways to back up your computer is to clone a copy of everything you have onto an external hard drive. If you own a Mac, it’s as easy as hooking up a drive via USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt and firing up Time Machine, which you can find on the right side of the menu bar. Click the “Backup Now” button and Time Machine will make a copy of everything on your machine. It’s a painless process, though the initial backup will take a while. If you don’t want to deal with wires, you can set up a Wi-Fi enabled hard drive like Apple’s Time Capsule or Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite.

The Windows 7 File Recovery link at the bottom left! Image: Microsoft

Windows users have a few more options, depending on which OS you’re running. Windows 7 users can use the simple Backup and Restore tool, located in the Control Panel under System and Maintenance. Windows 8 users need to do a bit of digging to back up a carbon copy of your computer system. You can set up a backup with File History — found in Control Panel’s System and Security — but that won’t make a complete clone. For that, you’ll need to go to the Windows 7 File Recovery link, located at the bottom left corner of the File History page.

The In-Crowd Option: Take It to the Cloud

If you don’t have the funds to throw down on a drive — or don’t trust yourself with one more piece of breakable/losable gadgetry — you can always back up your data to the cloud, as the cool kids are doing these days. There are plenty of services that let you back up all of your data via the internet. Take, Mozy for example. The company offers automatic online backups of your entire system, and throws in file syncing, too. And it’s pretty affordable at $6 a month for 50GB of storage and one computer. Plus, you can access your files on you mobile devices through the company’s iOS and Android apps.

(CrashPlan and Backblaze both sponsor World Backup Day. Both of their services are highly regarded and just as, or more, affordable than Mozy. But it felt a bit sleazy to plug them so directly, so we’re putting them here.)

The advantage to using these services is that you don’t have to worry about losing or breaking a physical drive. It’s also very unlikely that a highly-rated company would lose your data — and if it did, you could reasonably expect that it would go out of business. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. The disadvantages: Online services might be unavailable due to maintenance, and there’s always the possibility of your account getting hacked. Plus, you’re signing up for yet another bill.

The Cheapskate’s Option: Dropbox It for Free

Dropbox isn’t built as a backup service, but it’s not a bad option for safeguarding your most important files without spending any money. You can sign up for a free account, which gives you 2GB of storage. Refer your friends and Dropbox gives you another 500MB for each person. Or you can always pay $10 a month for 100GB of storage, but that kinda defeats the whole “free” thing.

You won’t be able to store your personal app data, like the information you have stored in your Contacts or in an offline calendar system. And 2GB isn’t a ton, but it should be enough to back up key files that you want to make sure never to lose — like your novel-in-progress or wedding photos. The good thing about Dropbox is that you can sync everything across different devices, all in one easy-to-manage Dropbox folder on your computer. And the more devices sync, the less likely you are to lose your data. Once you put a file into Dropbox, it syncs to all of your other computers (that are connected to Dropbox), and backs up a copy of that file on those devices as well. Dropbox also lets you look back on older versions of files or even deleted files.

If you’re a loyal Google, Microsoft or Apple user with all of your documents and files in a single companies’ products, then you can get good free file backups from them. Google Drive, Microsoft’s SkyDrive and iCloud all do the trick. Naturally, someone who lives in Google products will benefit from a paid Google Drive storage system, and SkyDrive is great for Windows, Office and Windows Phone users. Of course, you can always go iCloud for your Mac and iOS data. You’ll want to decide which free service works best for you depending on what other products you use. But you’ll want to make sure you have another backup in place (see below).

Back Up the Backup

The best way to make sure that you don’t suffer a huge digital data loss is to back up your backup. If you use iCloud to back up your photos and documents, it’s best to have those same photos and documents on another cloud service or hard drive (or both). Apple’s developer community has been especially outspoken about the difficulty of working with Apple’s cloud system with stories of data loss and corruption. It’s just not reliable as your sole backup. Your account can get hacked on any online service and an external hard drive can go bad or break. You should also consider having an offsite backup, like an external hard drive stored at your office or a storage locker or a trustworthy friend or relative’s house. No plan is totally bulletproof, but you can add extra armor to your backup plan by having more than one system in place.

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